now / then

To love is to get hurt. Anybody who has loved knows this. One who says “I haven’t been hurt” hasn’t really loved. Peter Ustinov summed it up neatly, in his delightful play Romanoff and Juliet, about the romance between the American ambassador’s daughter with the Russian ambassador’s son, by saying, “Love is hell.”

The problem is it is also heaven. There is nothing in life that compares with it. If you have once experienced the wild whirligig of love, it remains the brightest burning candle in your core. Jit, my neighbor in New Delhi, had gone to Boston as a student and promptly fallen in love with an auburn-haired Jewess in Boston. Her conservative ex-Irgun pilot brother was upset, but more insuperable proved Jit’s sophisticated but more conservative Rajput family. After two bourbons Jit, now fifty, a public sector honcho, could talk about nothing but his lost love and an ineradicable void. He knew he had once glimpsed a zenith no status or success had since let him come near.

An elderly, cultivated couple had once sought my help in Nepal to dissuade their daughter, a winsome doctor, from following her ‘crush,’ as they called it, and fly to the US to be with a visiting professor she had met for just two weeks in Kathmandu. Gently but firmly, I sided with the daughter, who I felt had the right to pursue her passion to the end of the earth, should it even turn out to be a chimera. To the parents’ disgust, I even gave her a visa. I cited to the perturbed parents the old saying that the whole world loves a lover – even a hard-nosed consul. In hindsight, I still believe I took the right view, though years later I found out that the relationship had not lasted.

Yes, love can end and hurt you. It can devastate you. But it devastates you more never to have experienced it. What could have been a fecund, flourishing field stays an arid desert. Why would you like to go through life without the exhilaration and excitement of what every poet writes about and every singer sings about? My friend, Fr Paul Detienne, who saw life for decades in Brussels and Kolkata, used to tell me that in a country where young men and women don’t get to see much of one another, perhaps an ‘arranged’ relationship has a greater chance of success. I countered that success did not matter a rat’s tail, for it was a business concept, and none should not give up the joy of existence for the dull peace of security.

​​Forty years ago, I was visiting my brother’s apartment in Kolkata when he showed me a calligraphic poster he had picked up at Russell Exchange, the famous antique dealer. He had loved the poetic words and wondered if I knew where they came from. He was taken aback when I said that they were from a letter sent from Turkey to Southern Greece 2000 years ago. The words had seemed very contemporary to him. I confessed I knew them only because they were in a notable scriptural book. What touched my brother touches me still, and I offer my own updated translation.

“If I can speak eloquently, even like an angel, but I do not have love, I am only a noisy talker. If I have the skill to predict the future and the knowledge to solve all mysteries, but I do not have love, I am nothing. If I have faith firm enough to move mountains, but I do not have love,I have achieved nothing. If I give all I have to the poor and suffer terrible hardship, but I do not have love, I have done nothing.

“Love is patient and kind. It does not envy or boast. It is not proud. It does not humiliate others, or look out only for itself, or lose its temper. It keeps no record of hurts. Love finds no joy in evil but celebrates the truth. It always protects, believes and hopes. Love never gives up.

“Love never fails. Predictions will fail; eloquence will end in silence; knowledge will prove transient. We know things only in part and we anticipate events only in part, but when we see it all, the parts fade. When I was a child, I talked, thought and argued like a child. When I became a man, I left my childish ways behind. Still we see imperfectly, like a reflection in a mirror; in time we will see clearly. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, and others will know me fully too.

Only three things last: faith, hope and love. And the greatest is love.”

The letter writer was right. What endures after all is love, in your life or in your heart.